No, you won't last long in melee. Fireball's strength lies in its ability to kill teams quickly... if you end up taking the fight to melee you will likely get slaughtered.
Your mage's fireball will indeed toast your familiar, but unless the opponent has Antimagic Field trained, your mage will not take damage from its own Fireball.

the important thing is that RBF reduce AMF backlash, which lets you skim on HP more. You shouldn't get more than 1 round of damage with the RBF, your FB is the damage source. It was really popular a while back.